Let's record some of these sequences into clips in session view. So I'm going to be using this MIDI controller to record some stuff but I'll also show you how to use your computer's keyboard and also how to click things in if that's what you'd prefer. So just to start off, I'm checking to make sure I've gotten MIDI coming into Ableton. I do, I'm seeing this light flash on the upper right hand side. So let's get going. I've selected this first MIDI track and I'm going to start with some drums. So heading over to Live's browser here, I'm going to select Drums on the left-hand side. So when I click on any of these titles, I'm going to get a preview. What you're hearing is not a loop, it's actually just a preview of the different sounds that are available to you inside of this kit. Let's click on a few and see what happens. Lots of cool options. So once you find one that jumps out at you, you're going to pull it onto a track. So I'll take this one, this one looks fun. So I can either click, drag and drop onto the track's title which will then have it show up in detail view down here, or I'll show you two other ways. With the track selected, I can click and drag down here into detail view, I'm just deleting in order to get that virtual instrument to remove itself from the track, or as long as the track selected and I double-click, it's going to show up as well. So three different ways to get the drum rack onto any MIDI track here. So it should automatically arm itself, but if not, you're just going to record-enable it. Then I'm going to play notes on my MIDI controller, and you should hear the samples playing back. So that is indeed happening to me. If you have a small MIDI controller like I do, this is only 25 keys, you may have to transpose up or down in order to access some of these samples here. Most likely it's going to be down. So I have a transpose button here on the left-hand side of my controller, and I can move around until I find the kick drum there. So that's a really simple thing that a lot of people run into. If you're not hitting the kick drum, transpose down. If you're doing this using your computer's keyboard, you can see I'm playing notes but there's no sound. But we're also seeing lights flash on the device which is saying, "Yes, I'm receiving MIDI, I'm just not playing the notes." To transpose down and up on your computer's keyboard you're going to use the Z key and the X key to go up. So I'm going to hit Z once, and I've got that percussion sound. I'm going to hit Z again, and now I'm hearing the kick drum. So I'm ready to record both ways with my MIDI controller and my computer's keyboard as well. So I'm going to just quickly come up with a pattern that I want to play, turn my metronome on, make sure I'm playing in time, it is very important. Cool. So now when I'm playing, I'm just going to hit Record on one of these clips and I'll just start recording in. When I'm done, I'll hit the icon, it'll be a red play icon and it'll immediately start to loop. So let me do that and then I'll meet you at the other end here. So we immediately start to loop. There's a measure at the beginning and the end which is empty, so I'm going to start by moving the start and stop markers to eliminate that silence. Over on the left-hand side, you could see if I've got my mouse surrounding the start markers and the loop markers, that the icon changes depending on where my cursor is, so I'm going to move it until I have this bracket and then I'm going to pull and drag over to the beginning of Measure 2. Then conversely at the other end here, I'm just going to pull and drag over to the beginning of Measure 6. So it's really important that you have things on whole numbers so that they'll loop properly. If you don't do that, then you'll find that the loops aren't matching up. It doesn't matter how long they are but as long as they're starting and stopping on whole numbers, you're going to be golden. So let's zoom in a little bit and check out what's going on with this MIDI here. So just as I had icons flashing when I was over here by the start and stop markers, I'm also going to get an array of icons available to me as I hover over the top of the sequence. So I'm going to go to the magnifying glass. Once I have this icon, when I click and drag around, this is how I'm going to zoom. This is functionality that's unique to Ableton, this way this zooms might feel strange at first but the more you do it, it gets a little bit easier to understand. So with the magnifying glass selected, I'm going to just click and drag down to zoom in and drag up to zoom out. I can go left and right at the same time, slightly disorienting. But let's just zoom in and see what's going on here. So I have the notes, if I touch it, it's going to play the sound for me. I can turn that on and off by this little headphone icon here. Then you can see the measure is broken down into an even more granular subdivision. I've got Measure 2 Beat 1, here is Measure 2 Beat 2, and then all of the subdivisions that are in-between those notes and the further you zoom in, the more granular that subdivision becomes. So you can see that I have played this note before the downbeat of Measure 2, and if I press Play, we're not going to hear it because we're not catching the beginning of that MIDI event. So let's edit this and make sure everything's the way that we want it to be. So just similar to moving the start and stop markers, if I go towards the beginning or end of any of these MIDI notes, I can expand or contract them as well. I'm just going to grab this bracket on the left hand side and pull that over. I can take any of these notes and move them up and down. I can click on one and then just delete it as well. I'm going to undo what I just did by using the most handy key command of them all which is undo. On a Mac it's Command Z, on a PC it's Ctrl Z. So I have a lot of editing capacity that I can do this by hand if I'd like to, or we can do something called quantize which will save you a lot of time. Quantize means to scoot something to its closest assumed place on a grid. I'm going to quantize the rest of the sequence so that everything just cleans and moves to the right place quickly and fast. So I'm going to just highlight all of these events just like text here. Now I need to head to the edit Window up top and I'm going to select the quantize settings first. So two things that you really need to take into consideration when you're quantizing. The first is what subdivision do you want to quantize to? If you're familiar with theoretical terms of music, you should just pick the one that is the smallest subdivision represented in your MIDI sequence. If not, I just recommend you keep this on the 16th note. If you've only got quarter notes in your sequence, pick quarter note, but if all those fails, just choose the 16th note. We're going to keep this on adjusting to the start and then next we have to decide to what percentage do we want to quantize to. So if you play an instrument or you have your own way of recording these sequences in by hand, you don't want to eliminate all of that personal feel, so you're not going to set it to a 100. But if you want something to be a little bit more straight to a grid and some genres do call for that, then you're going to knock this number up closer to a 100. So depending on how accurate you were, you're going to decide how much help you need. So I'm going to set this to 77 percent here, show it to the 16th notes. All these notes are selected, I'm going to press Okay and they're going to jump and you'll see this happening right now. Let's play this and see what we got going on now. Sounds great. So let's continue on here. I'm going to duplicate this clip, and I can do that by using copy paste shortcuts on my computer, or I'll show you how to do this with a modifier key. So I'm holding down option, I'm clicking and I'm dragging it to the next clip slot. I'm letting go off the cursor, and then I'm letting go off option, and I have two copies of this clip now. So I'm going to be working in the second one. It's really important to have it selected, and I'm going to overdub some MIDI. This time, I'll use my computer's keyboard to do that. I'm going to put some hi-hats in there. So there's already a play icon in here. So what I need to do is use a function called session record. I don't have a record icon. There's already a sequence. So the only option Ableton is giving is to press play. So I have to use the special session record button. It's up here on the top in the middle. It looks like a record icon, but it's hollow in the middle. So I'm going to launch this, and then I'll press record here. You can see it's turned red. So I can punch in and out at anytime using the session record button, and that's for MIDI-sequences that have existing MIDI inside of it. This is not on the global quantization. Whenever I'm ready, it's going to happen. So here I go and I press record. Hit session record. Punching out. Okay, fun. So I am not going to quantize that because I did a ton of different subdivisions, and I want to maintain my groove in my swing when I did that. Perhaps, I want to adjust some of the velocities or the loudness of any of these events. So I'm going to select this. I've got the note over here on the piano roll, and you can see all of those hi-hats get highlighted for me. Then down below, this is a velocity representation. If you aren't seeing this on your computer, you can open and show this by hitting this disclosure triangle on the bottom left of the sequence. So each note below is the velocity or the loudness of the node is represented by a line with a dot on top of it. You can see, as I hover over, the note that I've got selected or the velocity assignment that's selected is going to be blue or turn another color up top. So I couldn't adjust them all, I could just select one of them here, and then adjust to the loudness of the velocity of this particular event. It's up to you. What I'm go to do is I've got all of these selected here. I'm going to grab my pencil tool and I'm going to quickly just redraw in some of the velocities here. So I wanted to get louder, and softer, and louder, and softer. So I'm just really quickly adjusting these with my pencil tool, and I can turn that on and off using this icon up top, or I could just go back in by hand and adjust things one at a time by moving the break-point at the top of the velocity assignments. So let's see what that sounds like. Okay, great. So I've got a lot of nice variation happening as well. So for the third and final representation of how to get MIDI in, I'm going use the pencil tool and just click some MIDI in. So I'm going to repeat the same function of copying and pasting, I'm holding down option, I'm going to click drag, and then here is the third version of this clip. So let's pick a new sound. It's got to fun. I'm going to just clicking in literally just finding the place on the grid where I want this to be, and clicking in a sound. You can do this with the pencil tool as well. Let's play this and see what this sounds like. Cool. I'm going to move this one over a bit so that it all gets to play. So now, I've got three different versions of this pattern. I've got Pattern 1, which is just the kick and snare sound, and here's the high-hats included in. Here with the spun percussion sound. So we've got our drums in. Let's add another MIDI track. Let's do some melodic or harmonic sound to accompany our very cool drum patterns here. So I've got MIDI 2 selected, and I'm headed over to sounds on the left-hand side. You can see that there's a lot of options for us here. Depending on how much you've downloaded, you might have a lot of options in the sounds category or not as many. I'm going to go into this piano keys section since that will probably be familiar to almost everybody. Then just how I previewed the drums, I'm going to just play one, tube really like this. So I've got the track selected. I'm just going to double-click on it, and it inserts itself, it arms itself. We're going to play this first clip, come up with a pattern I like. Then I'll just record, and here I go. Hitting play again, I immediately start to loop, and then quickly I'm just going to do the same edit. So I'm going to get rid of the dead space by moving this over, just the start of this first event here so that I'm catching it, leaving the stop icon. Here we go. Fantastic. So I'll do another one and I'll use my computer's keyboard so you can see this. Faster. Fill in that dead space in the end there. So these are all software. So what I'm going to do is select all of the MIDI. Let's go around find it, and I'm going to turn them up so that they're matching in volume to the other ones here. Lastly, if I wanted to just click the MIDI in, I could just double-click on an empty clip here. It's going to give me an empty one-bar clip, but I want to extend this. I'm just going to grab the stop markers, pull out here, and make it however long I want it to be. I'll stop at two measures here, and then I can use the pencil tool or however I want to do this. I'm zooming horizontally as well as vertically by using the same magnifying icon on the left as I did on the top here. I'll just click some notes in. Here we go. So you've seen this done three ways. We've clicked it in, we've played with our computer's keyboard, we've recorded it in with a MIDI controller. Each of us has access to different technology or we just want to wrap our brains around something a different way. So none of these are better or worse than the other. It's all just about getting your ideas down, and that's how we've got MIDI into Ableton and are just continuing to develop our ideas.
